Andy Matuschak said a bunch that I was going to say. I’ll add a few more complaints thoughts about the new iTunes 7 interface:
What’s Uncool:
1) They changed the tab focus behavior. Now all my motor memory is screwed up. Before, I could reliably hit Command-L to select the current song, hit tab twice to get to the search box, type some search terms, hit tab again, and start using the arrow keys to navigate the song list. But they changed the order, and now I found myself typing in the source list, displaying a random playlist based on the first few letters I typed. When I switched back to the library view, iTunes had inconveniently removed the search terms I HAD gotten in there.
2) It’s no longer obvious how to start the visualizer, nor how to show the equalizer window. Their buttons have been removed. More infuriatingly, Command-1 and Command-2 used to show the main window and the equalizer respectively, but now those keys do absolutely nothing. WHY REMOVE FEATURES??
3) The Back/Play/Forward buttons at the top look like something you could do in Illustrator, not a polished Apple UI. Dumb.
4) The graphical album list view is a blatant Windows Media UI ripoff, and isn’t even that useful. The entire point of digital music downloads is that you can download only one or two songs from an album. Do you realize how much empty, wasted space such a list view has when you do that?
All in all, it looks like our user interface is going the way of Mac OS 9, or — worse, but in some ways more likely — NeXTSTEP.
What’s cool:
A) The multiple speakers button now shows how many speakers you’re using. Obscure tip: By the way, if you use the Shift key while selecting remote or local speakers, it adds or subtracts them from the current set … no need to use the little Multiple Speakers window that I hate so much.
B) That organized source list will be perfect for a new app I’ve been planning. Saves me on UI puzzling.
13/09/2006 at September 13, 2006 @ 11:07pm Permalink
I dunno, the only problem i have with it is the scroll bars. They’re messed up. They don’t even pay attention to the TinkerTool hack to make both arrows at both ends. I like the album art viewer, though i think the list view with the big album covers needs be different. i think that when the album is unknown, it needs to group them by artist, and not have that big “No Album Art” square next to each individual song. ‘twould be less cluttered. That’s my opinion.